Increasingly, business users are being given the ability to develop their own custom software through cloud computing systems. A typical business user, such as an accountant or manager, is not a software developer. Therefore, the resources provided to business users to perform software development are generally tailored to a particular problem or business domain. For example, the business user may utilize a domain specific language (DSL) which may include business-specific logic which is easier and more intuitive for the average business user to work with as compared to general purpose programming languages such as Java.
When a software developer is writing code, the developer can compile and execute the code in a debugging mode. The debugging mode allows the developer a window into how the code the developer has written is executing. When code is executed in a debugging mode, the developer can typically: view variable values during execution, set breakpoints at which execution of the code will halt until the developer triggers continued execution, and/or step through execution of the code on a line-by-line basis.
The use of DSLs for the specification of business logic in the cloud requires the creation of debuggers to support those languages. As cloud based development increases, the increase in the number of DSLs, and their debuggers, has also increased. Many of the functions of a modern debugger are common to all languages. For example, debuggers visualize control flow and support the inspection of machine variables. However, there is no universal, common architecture for the creation of debuggers. This causes an industry-wide duplication of effort in the creation of debuggers and a lack of compatibility between debuggers.